Not immediately, though. He had to wade through application development before he convinced Lekovius to let him form his own game-centered division, Gamer’s Edge. While hiring staff, Romero found John Carmack. He and Carmack developed an instant camaraderie due to their mutual obsession: coding. They “pounded out code” for days and nights, heavy metal the only discernable background noise. Carmack did graphics engines while Romero made development tools. For Romero, it was heaven. Then Carmack changed PC gaming forever.

“I came in one morning,” Romero says softly, “and there was a disk on my keyboard with ‘Run me’ written on it. I ran the Dave2.exe file on the disk, and I saw this Super Mario 3 screen come up with one of my characters – Dangerous Dave – and as soon as he got close to the right of the screen, it scrolled smoothly. I’d never seen a PC do that before. I was just destroyed. It was only seven months after starting the division that we left to form id Software.”

Lekovius went litigious. Gamer’s Edge had a substantial following, so the Softdisk president’s fury was understandable. As a compromise, the newly formed id Software kept the Softdisk team posted regarding Carmack’s technology, and would make games for the company for a year.

While id was busy making 2D games like the Commander Keen platformers, Origin was assembling Ultima Underworld. Underworld’s most revolutionary feature – its realtime 3D visuals – allowed it to be played from a firstperson perspective. It was serendipitous that Romero decided to give Paul Neurath (his ex-colleague and Underworld’s lead designer) a call. Neurath told Romero all about texture-mapping, the new technology that allowed artists to paste pictures on to 3D objects, making the virtual space look real. Romero told Carmack about the technique, and after a few seconds of silent contemplation, Carmack said: “Yeah, I can do that.”

id made certain compromises to the notion of texture-mapping to boost speed – it removed ceilings and floors, and walls were all at 90º angles – and made its first texture-mapped game, Catacomb 3D. But something wasn’t gelling. “We’d done Hovertank before Catacomb,” Romero relates, “and that was 3D. You were in a tank. That didn’t feel right. Then we did Catacomb, and you had the player’s hand up there, shooting fireballs. We were like: ‘That’s better, but not quite there’. And then we thought: ‘Let’s see if guns do it’.”



Guns did it.

Wolfenstein 3D, a game about escaping a Nazi prison, enthralled gamers like nothing else in 1992. It made id Software one of the most prestigious games studios worldwide, and Romero a star. And, thanks to a clever publishing scheme, it made id a lot of money, too.

“We had a 50/50 deal with Apogee, our distributors, and we did this awesome pricing structure on the game,” Romero enthuses. “For $35, you’d get the first three episodes of Wolfenstein. For another $15, you’d get another three episodes, which we called the Nocturnal Missions. And then for another $10, you got the entire strategy guide for the game. And guess what? Ninety-five per cent of the users bought the $60 version of the game.”

Swarms of gamers bought the game, but it was just a taste of things to come. Carmack was experimenting with a new graphics engine, one that afforded truly cohesive 3D spaces with angled architecture, differing height levels, and realistic lighting. After turning down 20th Century Fox’s offer to use the tech in an Aliens adaptation, id came up with a unique premise: a blend of sci-fi and the biblical.

“It was like: ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah, you’re out in space and you meet aliens’,” Romero groans. “Everyone expects that. So we were like: ‘What if we do something different?’ You know, the future is about progress, and religion and the devil and God and all that is just so… backward, so we said, ‘What if you go into space and it’s true? What if you find Hell? Wouldn’t that be crazy?!’ They were such opposites.”

Gamers took to the juxtaposition with an ardor that eclipsed Wolfenstein’s success entirely. When Doom was premiered in December 1993, the demand for the game crashed the FTP server hosting it at the University of Wisconsin. It became a global pop-culture phenomenon. Unsurprisingly, the pressure surrounding the development of id’s next property was intense. Romero didn’t want to make another Doom sequel – 1994’s Doom II was as far as he’d go – so he began working on a radically different design. Its name? Quake. As development commenced and began to plateau, though, Romero’s ambitious plan was shelved. Carmack declared a new mandate: rework Doom. Romero was crushed that his company – which always strove to try new things, he says – was turning against him. He decided then that after Quake’s completion, he’d leave id Software and form his own studio.



After Quake hit shelves on June 22, 1996, Romero was fired before he could quit.

Unfazed, Romero formed Ion Storm in November that year. In 1997, he relocated Ion to the coveted penthouse of the JPMorgan Chase Tower in Dallas. After being stuck in id’s drab offices for the first half of the ’90s, Romero wanted something more luxurious, hence the penthouse and Ion’s notoriously ostentatious offices. “I just wanted a really nice space to work in,” he shrugs. “I was tired of working in an office with grey walls. We had all this money at id, and we had an office that looked like the one next to us. It was ridiculous.”

The spending earned Ion significant press at the time. But public opinion soured as Ion’s first release, Dominion, attracted critical scorn. Romero’s magnum opus, Daikatana, descended into one of the most infamously protracted development cycles the business has ever known – and when it was finally released in September 2000, its tepid sales and reputation all but put an end to the Ion Dallas offices. Romero’s industry cred was in tatters.